


Klausabama Peaches

by Austennerdita2533



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: A Kinda-Sorta Sweet Home Alabama Fusion, A happy ending (which we all need), Alternate Universe - Human, But estranged for reasons, F/M, Humor, Light Angst, No Babies, Puns & Word Play, So Married, Some southern colloquialisms and slang, college sweethearts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 21:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15470238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Austennerdita2533/pseuds/Austennerdita2533
Summary: Klaus and Caroline were young, impetuous, and deeply in love when they married. But now, six years later, they're estranged for reasons that've caused her to flee from the first home they built together and him to retreat into his art and his grumpy, reclusive ways. What happens when she turns up back in Virginia on a whim? Can he convince her to stay?





	Klausabama Peaches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [3tinkgemini](https://archiveofourown.org/users/3tinkgemini/gifts).



> Hello there giftee. :) Since you were so generous and flexible with your wants, I had a wide selection of AUs and character possibilities to choose from which allowed me to sit down, write, and simply see what came out. You mentioned to me that you enjoyed "growing up together" fics, so while this doesn't fit into that trope exactly, I think the Sweet Home Alabama-ness and romcom-y feel runs alongside it. 
> 
> Anyway, I had a blast writing this for our last KC Mag exchange. Our fandom is full of so many fantastic, creative people and I'm so fortunate to be a part of it. Can't wait to see all of the other contributions. I hope you enjoy this! :-D

The crunch of car tires filled the air. 

Blue eyes widened in uncertainty then narrowed in anticipation from where a man stood, rigid, behind the screen door of a large enclosed porch. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, expression teetering somewhere between fraught and restless as he watched a fancy car jostle down the bumpy lane toward his home slower than a snail. Jagger bushes and low-drooping branches scuffing its sides all the way. 

The weedy drive was tricky to maneuver by vehicle. Divots and overgrown foliage cluttered all sides, all angles, making steering both slow and laborious. Worse, it was a purposeful landscape he’d pruned in a buck wild fashion a few years back so that the locals gave him privacy. Or better yet, stayed away.

Most people had interpreted this want of seclusion as artistic in nature, or as a part of his “creative process” for the renown commissions he earned in cultural hubs all over the world, so they let him fester there, crankily, on his own much of the time. Refraining from bothering him for anything besides town improvement donations or Halloween. The latter inconvenience, in particular, was a consequence of the town kids glorifying him into a snarling spectre-like legend who only the “daring” or “brave” visited for candy to see if they could survive his wrath before he sliced their ding-dong-ditch feet at the tendon. A _Disturb Me and Die_ sign flapping from his gate in warning all 365 days. 

It’s how the property had acquired the name Klausabama in the first place: for both its southern outskirt location and its sequestered, testy owner who disliked company, concern, or cute and curious new faces. 

But a select few - his siblings, mostly - knew that this place was so much more to him than a private island of artistic virtuoso. It was where his mind replayed every memory, every moment. It was where his heart lived and ached…

Still toiling over the lovely life he’d nearly had, then lost all the same. 

His happiness had tipped over an edge just out of reach for reasons that’d seemed ludicrous and unjust to him then; and, now, felt like a punishment that would never end. That is, until Rebekah called him yesterday.

_“You what?” Klaus had growled into the phone, smeared in an array of colors from fingers to bicep. “When? Why now?”_

_“How the bloody hell should I know!? It’s not like there’s a low-jack stamped to her ass, Nik. But soon. Probably within the next day or so,” she said._

_“Never low-jack a gal’s bum without permission or else she’ll grow sore with you,” Kol piped in from somewhere in the background.“I’m afraid I learned that one the hard way myself.”_

_“You don’t say,” Klaus replied drily. He rubbed at his pounding temples. Then blinked to appease the burning in his eyes, which were bloodshot from lack of sleep and too much bourbon.“Please tell me our brother’s infantile charms weren’t wasted on her today at least, Rebekah? May God grant me that one reprieve.”_

_“Thankfully, no,” his sister replied._

_“Oi! That’s judgmental, you prats!”_

_“Not if it’s true, idiot,” Rebekah hissed._

_“Careful,” Kol said in a mischievous lilt, the crinkling laughter around his mouth almost audible from half a world away. “Those are fighting words.”_

_“Oh, don’t you dare! Stay away from me with that! Do something, Enzo,“ she begged, “stop him, stop him!”_

_There was some banging commotion on the other end of the line then—a slap or two followed by some whispering, a shriek, dropped silverware, scudding chairs, and a threat of castration if he “pinched her there again.” All of which was punctuated by Kol and Enzo’s uproarious chuckling._

_After a few more moments of this, the three of them now more than a little short of breath, Rebekah shushed them so she could resume her conversation with Klaus, who was growing more and more impatient the longer he waited for an explanation._

_“Continue, please,” he said at last. “I haven’t got idle time to waste.”_

_“Too busy thinking the day away, are you, mate?” Enzo said tauntingly._

_“Talk, sister,” he demanded._

_“The gist of it is this: I bumped into her at Fashion Week in Paris. We chatted about her new I Fancy You clothing label then went to a late lunch at that café off the Seine you love so much…where I may or may not have mentioned that you’d turned into the most peevish, miserable, hopeless recluse alive since The Event. Which you have,” she added honestly, also a little guiltily._

_“Then, before I knew it, something seemed to click in her head because she was throwing plastic at the bill, intent as a bloody hawk on catching the next flight there. Straight away.”_

_“So, essentially that means—”_

_“It means I’d buckle up if I were you, Klausy,” Enzo had warned seconds before the call went dead, “because the ball and chain is on her way…”_

The red convertible rolled to a stop in the gravel drive at the same moment Klaus stepped out onto the back porch landing and into the pale sunshine of a late September morning. Scratching at his day five stubble with a paint-splotched hand, he leaned his left hip against the stair post, rested an elbow against the white railing, then watched as a pair of long bare legs footed in Monolo Blahninks climbed out of the driver’s seat.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my long lost Mystic peach herself back from the City of Lights! Howdy there,” Klaus said in squinted greeting, a hand over his brow like a visor. “And to what do I owe this overdue pleasure, peaches?”

Scowling up at him, Caroline threw her purse over her shoulder. The car door slammed behind her. “You know I hate it when you call me that.”

“Oh? Since when?” he said.

“Since always. I’m not from Georgia.”

“My apologies then,” Klaus said with a bow of his head, lingering over the last word in the provoking drawl she once knew like a second language, “peaches.”

“God, and to think I haven't had to deal with infuriating nicknames for years now.”

“Is that so?” A smirk slid across Klaus’s lips, and although it was meant to appear complacent and unbothered, it came out feeling rather stiff. “How many, I wonder? Shall we count them out loud together?”

“Let’s not.” 

They were no longer talking about nicknames, and Caroline knew it. Still, he raised a hand and rattled them off his fingers, anyway.

“One year…two years…three, four, five…six.”

“Look—” 

“What? Do you want the days, months, and hours, too?” he asked.

Frustrated, Caroline’s hand curled harder around her purse straps. 

“Listen—” She ran her tongue across her bottom row of teeth, grunting out a tight smile as she tramped through the backyard grass toward a cobblestone sidewalk. “How about we cut the rustic charm and cluelessness, okay? It’ll make this whole process a lot easier on the both of us,” she said.

“Sorry, darlin’, but I reckon I don’t know what ‘this process’ is supposed to mean. Care to elaborate?”

“No. Not when we both know it’s pointless and unnecessary.”

“Well, shucks, you got me there, dumplin’,” he said with a rap of his knuckles against the railing as she approached.

“Oh my God, would you knock it off with the lame southern endearments and dropped consonants already!?” Caroline asked with a barely repressed huff. 

“Naw. What for, sweetheart?”

“I mean, seriously, Klaus. Stop pretending like you don’t know why I’m here. Katherine and Bonnie already told me Rebekah phoned ahead.” 

“You quite liked those endearments once upon a time, if I’m not mistaken, love,” Klaus said, redirecting the conversation to avoid the brunt of this reunion a little while longer. His bravado mask slipped a little with the clench of his jaw, however; and with the slight downturn of his mouth. Voice rawing slightly, “What’s changed?”

Caroline paused on the sidewalk. Her brow arched, but her head was heavy with some emotion hidden behind her designer sunglasses as she tilted it up to look at him. 

“Nothing,” she said. Sighing, her arms rose then fell back against her sides with a hollow laugh. “Everything.”

“How contradictory.” 

Klaus peered down with crossed arms as she approached the stairs, his gaze roving over the little Parisian dress she wore and how it clung to her hips in all the right places. The fabric was made out of a sheer icy blue, sharp seams, and was as daring as a glacier in v-neck plunge. Sleeveless and tapered just above the knee, it was striking and bright yet elegant in a way that almost seemed to refract the light as she moved toward him. Prickly beams of watery gold cascaded down her legs, dancing across her tiny waist to shine the ground near her feet. Shimmering in aura around her. 

The fitted skirt rippled slightly higher and higher up her thighs with each step forward, making him nostalgic for those old college days when their love was young and still untested enough for his fingers to graze her skin through the holes of her worn-out patchwork jeans in stolen moments in the art studio, during Black and White night at the dilapidated drive-in theater down the road, after particularly violent arguments about the future with his stepfather, Mikael; then later, in quiet moments before dawn when she was bent over their kitchen table covered in yards and yards of vibrant fabric because she was too inspired to sleep. It made him hungry for the opportunity to lift these new ritzy designs off her body with his thumbs, then shred the brands into no-name buttons with the gentle nipping of his teeth. He wanted to zip his way down and across Caroline’s body so she’d remember it all. Everything.

But especially…he especially wanted her to remember how well they’d always fit together. And how they still would.

Klaus would feel more at ease right now if he knew he could keep her stilettos from puncturing his gut if she decided to resist what lay between them again. If he only knew she wouldn’t kick him and run off with his heart today.

“First off, you’re British,” Caroline continued, her heels clicking up step after step until she reached the landing where he waited, “so your fake accent is disorienting. Second, you and I both know southern slang isn’t part of your pretentious Cambridge vocabulary. And third, you know damn well why I’m here so cut. the. freaking. crap.”

“I beg your pardon, love, but this is how simple, settled, country boys talk,” Klaus countered as he ushered her through the screen door. It swung shut like an old chapter behind them: with a well-worn _creak_. “Or perhaps you’ve been gone too long to remember, hm?”

“Last I checked, so-called simple country boys didn’t live on sprawling multimillion dollar plantations in Virginia, either. But, hey, what do I know?” she said with a trite laugh, gesturing at the main house across the way. 

“You’re the one who wanted a spacious vacation home in your hometown, if I recall.”

“Point being?”

“No point. Just relaying a fact.”

“Smart ass,” she muttered under her breath.

With his mouth bent near her golden head, Klaus pressed a hand against the small of her back and drank in her familiarly strange scent as they crossed through the kitchen. Then into a sunroom which sat facing a quaint dock and a silvery green lake. 

“I’m afraid six years away would smog even the most fashionable of brains, truth be told. It’s simply surprising to me you remembered our old address is all,” Klaus remarked pointedly. 

“Yes, well, you look no hungrier than when I last saw you,” Caroline said glazing over his last comment. “Though you’re in desperate need of a good shave.”

“You mean before you left that ‘gone grocery shopping’ post-it, hopped on a plane to New York, and phoned to say you were never coming home?”

“Maybe.” She appraised him cooly from head-to-foot, running her hand through his scraggly beard before she thought better of it and realized touching him was no good. Not when she couldn’t disguise the hitch of her breath, anyway. “By the way, when is the last time you took a razor to your face?” she asked.

“Not all artists must starve or shave, Caroline, but I assure you most of us suffer all the same,” Klaus replied as he leaned into her touch. He’d quite missed the warmth of her palm, the softness of her skin, so he wasn’t eager for it to melt away so soon. 

“Meaning you?” 

“Me more than most, I’d wager.”

She scoffed, but it didn’t match the woe on her face. 

“So you say, Mikaelson.”

“Look around if you don’t believe me,” he said with a wave.

Clonking against his shoulder then, rolling her eyes (albeit a little distractedly), she veered away to circle a coffee table that was cluttered with canvases, paint brushes, and sculpture clay. She ran her fingers across his half-finished creations, sifted through a few balled-up sketches of her face and dark-themed paintings pocked in loneliness with a creased forehead and a contrite smile, clearing her throat before he could dissect the plaintiveness of her movements. Then she plopped down into an old rocker, her purse on her lap.

“You always were dramatic, weren’t you?” 

A manila folder appeared in her hand. Clearing a space, Caroline set it on the surface between them. Sliding it toward him with her index finger.

“Stubborn, too,” she added as she flipped to the signature page.

“Ah, yes. Says the woman - my darling estranged _wife—_ ” Klaus said while he dragged a chair across the floor, slamming it, and himself, down into it in a backward straddle with a growl, “who’s decided to blow through my door like a tumbleweed after over half a decade away. But go on. Continue to call _me_ stubborn and dramatic, by all means.”

“You knew where I was, Klaus. Why I had to—” 

“Why you had to go, yes,” he finished for her gruffly, compressing his lips.

Nodding, refusing to look up, Caroline tucked a curl roughly behind her ear while she tore through the pockets of her handbag in search of a pen. “Good. I’m glad you understand.”

“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. It doesn’t matter since I cannot sign these today. I just—” Sighing, his two front teeth scraped over his bottom lip. He lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug as he stood to grab and tuck the divorce papers under his armpit. “I won’t do it. I’m sorry.” 

Caroline’s hands ceased their jittery rummaging for a moment when he uttered these words. Her eyes flicked to his face like a dart in exacting scrutiny and curiosity, her handbag slipping from her lap to the floor with a resounding _thud_. 

“You have no choice. It’s…it’s why I came back here,” she said.

“Is it?” Quizzical, Klaus tilted his head to fix her with a look. “Is it truly?”

“Of course it is! It’s not like I wanted to do this in person or anything, okay? I mailed and re-mailed those documents to you a good two dozen times,” Caroline exclaimed a little too forcefully, her voice cracking. Emotion climbing so high between them she sprang to her feet in front of him. “But as usual, like the selfish stubborn bastard you know you are sometimes, you gave me no choice but to come back here to face you, didn’t you? No choice at all.” 

“No need to lie, sweetheart.”

“Excuse me!?”

“You wanted to see me again. I see it in your eyes,” he said, “I hear it in the way your pulse thumps when you think I’m about to touch you.”

“Don’t,” Caroline responded hoarsely. Shaking her head, pain stinging the corners of her eyes now, she raised a hand between them almost in barrier. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what, peaches? Be honest?” Stepping forward, Klaus reached out a hand to brush a fallen curl off her cheek to which she reacted with a sniff. With a leaning-in sigh. “I can feel how much you miss me.”

“I said don’t,” she pleaded.

There was so much hollow frustration and anger tied up in tenderness when Caroline looked at him here that it was difficult to tell what she wanted more: to kiss him or to kill him? Which, oddly enough, made Klaus breathe a little easier (it made him want to chuckle, frankly) because this felt familiar somehow. It was much closer to the-tempestuous-girl-in-denial meets the-persistent-yet-emotionally-damaged boy they’d both been when they first met as teenagers at George Mason University. He, a sophomore exchange student from Cambridge studying art and business; she, a small-town freshman on scholarship for business and marketing with minors in communications and design. 

This, right now, was how their relationship had always functioned in the past. Teetering on the edge somewhere between passion, pain, and promises yet to be made. In a weird way, it was comforting to know that hadn’t changed. Except, today, they’d finally reached an impasse she wouldn’t be able to navigate around. 

(Not for much longer, at any rate.)

“Mikael might have poisoned your mind with lies about me, about us and our impetuous marriage at ages 20 and 21 respectively,” Klaus continued, “but I never wanted anything he offered. Not my trust fund…not a job at his corrupt company…nothing. Don’t you understand I would’ve slain the whole bloody world to make you happy, to bolster the fashion dreams you were determined to pursue regardless of what that damned man plotted against me? Don't you know I’d follow you anywhere? That I’d fight forever to give you everything you want?”

Standing and retreating toward the window, Caroline’s tears pooled against her lashes as she lifted her wobbling chin to say, “I don’t—I don’t understand what you…”

Without hesitation, Klaus slid the divorce papers out from under his arm and ripped them in halves, then in quarters, then in eighths last to show her how much he meant this. It wasn’t a crime to need her then, and it sure as hell wasn’t a crime to need her now, so he let the vulnerability he hated so much sprinkle onto the hardwood with those unsigned documents like snow. Crunching them beneath the tread of his shoes while he lifted her chin with his thumb and forefinger.

“I’m saying I meant my vows. All I wanted was you back then, peaches,” he explained, heart in his throat, “I’m saying I still do. Isn’t it obvious by now that this is the kind of truth that won’t change no matter what? Can’t you see, can’t you feel how much I still adore you?”

Caroline couldn’t bring herself to answer him; she couldn’t speak. But when she next moved, her tears mixed with the crushing rush of her arms around his middle made the words ‘ _I do_ ’ superfluous, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I know the reason for their time apart is probably vague and underdeveloped, but I was being lazy.
> 
> Comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!


End file.
